Ji Chaozhu

Ji Chaozhu (July 30, 1929 – April 29, 2020) was a Chinese diplomat who held a number of important positions in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China (PRC), most notably as English interpreter for Chairman Mao Zedong, Premier Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping; later as Ambassador to the Court of St. James's (United Kingdom); and lastly as an Under-secretary General of the United Nations, a post from which he retired in 1996. He played a central role in the talks leading up to and during President Richard M. Nixon's historic 1972 visit to China. His memoir, The Man on Mao's Right, was published in July 2008, by Random House. Early years in U.S. Ji was born on July 30, 1929, in Shanxi Province to an affluent family who were also sympathetic to the Communist Party. His father was a wealthy landlord, lawyer, and provincial official, while his eldest brother, Ji Chaoding, was a noted economist who earned a Ph.D. at Columbia University. Ji and his family fled their home in Taiyuan, the provincial capital, in the late 1930s during the Second Sino-Japanese War. At the urging of Zhou Enlai, who had established relations with Chaoding in the mid-1920s, Ji's family emigrated to New York City in 1939, when Ji was nine years old. He earned a high school diploma from Horace Mann-Lincoln High School (now known as Horace Mann School), and attended Camp Rising Sun in 1944. He was a sophomore at Harvard University in 1950 when the Korean War broke out, which saw his native homeland and his adopted country fight on opposite sides. Ji described how he "was torn between [his] love for two countries", but knew that he "was fundamentally Chinese". Return to China Ji left Harvard in the middle of his studies and returned to the newly formed People's Republic of China. He studied chemistry at Tsinghua University in Beijing, with the goal of being a scientist and developing nuclear weapons for the PRC. He was instead selected to be an interpreter and notetaker at the negotiations in Panmunjom that would eventually bring an end to the Korean War, due to his English-language skills. After two years in Korea, he returned to Beijing where he was recruited to become Zhou's English interpreter, accompanying the Premier to the 1954 Geneva Conference, and on Zhou's many other international trips.